One. Reddit started out as a successor to Digg. Digg doesn’t really exist anymore. But Digg was a successor to Slashdot, which almost let anyone submit stories to it but not quite, and had an elaborate, almost byzantine system for ranking and evaluating comments left on those stories. These were the early days of the Internet. People w...

One. My ex knew a woman with a podcast. She was fascinated by this podcast. It was a mental health podcast—a guide to dealing with crippling mental health issues, and to finding happiness and peace. It had exactly two followers: me and my ex, each out of morbid curiosity. And it had no content. Oh, it had episodes, and quite a few of t...

The iPad Pro excites me more than any new piece of technology since the… Well. That’s a bit tricky to answer. I can’t entirely remember being this excited about a new device. I’ve been excited about the iPad Pro since it was first announced in 2015. But I haven’t owned an iPad Pro until just this week. I’m pretty slow to acquire new gi...

Here's my hot take about covering songs: if you're going to play somebody else's music, you need to find something worth saying about the original song. Standards can vary: sometimes a band covers a song because they really goddamn love that song, and the message is just how much love they goddamn have, and that can be alright! Other t...

When I was young, I devoured books, to help offset the boredom of living in a nothing little suburb. Boredom was a menace, to be dreaded if not feared. How many hours dragged slowly, tediously by, as I felt the laborious slowness that truly defines life? No wonder we seek to escape it—a world of idle amusements has its drawbacks, but h...

A few weeks before David Heinemeier Hansson announced a policy at his company that subsequently resulted in a third of his employees abruptly quitting (with more very possibly on the way), he and I had a brief email exchange about Glenn Greenwald. Hansson had written a post talking about how much he disliked the reaction Greenwald rece...

Good morning. Konore is very good. Have some wake-up. Konore — "Chinese Butter" That one's quite energetic. The next one is chiller. Konore — "In the Meadow" Konore is one of the members of Controversial Spark, which is the newest project of a man named Keiichi Suzuki who I borderline revere. Keiichi, who's best known in America for wr...

In keeping with my general attempt not to turn a blind eye to the lousy behaviors of people I like, I should mention that the two founders of Basecamp—the company responsible for the thing I send you these words with—decided collectively to ask their employees not to talk politics on the company's internal app. Here's the less-fiery fo...

Richard Siken is a poet. He has released two marvelous poetry collections, each quite different from the other. The one, Crush, is about as excruciating and romantic and despairing a collection of poems as has ever been written; the other, War of the Foxes, is an evocative philosophical exploration of art, conflict, and purpose. This e...

“Suppose that through the medium of the movies pulp, with its five-and-dime myths, can take a stronger hold on people's imaginations than art, because it doesn't affect the conscious imagination, the way a great novel does, but the private, hidden imagination, the primitive fantasy life—and with an immediacy that leaves no room for tho...

Big Onion Not sure why the camera focused on my thumb here. Weird. This is the big onion. I bought it at Trader Joe's, which charges per-vegetable and not per-pound, so the big onion only cost me 99¢. I have used it twice, substantially both times, and it is still absolutely massive. I love you, big onion. Nice Salad I invented this ni...

The holy war of our era is the war against bullshit: bullshit in the Frankfurter sense, the kind that isn't primarily false so much as it serves to gum up our radars altogether, overwhelming us to the point that we're too exhausted to search for truth, or too despairing to believe in it. Political lies. Corporate lies. This is nothing ...

I have two voices which, to me, sound authentically like my own. One is the voice I use here, but not when I publish with a specific audience in mind: once I know who I’m trying to reach, my voice becomes a product of sorts, intended to grease the route from my mind to theirs till the passage is as slick as can possibly be. Writing her...

I wrote this for a friend on a lark several weeks ago. Last night, I felt a hankering to write about On Cinema at the Cinema, which I'm fairly obsessed with, and felt like I'd be retreading too much of this piece's ground, so here, have this one instead! The comedy of Tim Heidecker and many of those affiliated with him—Eric Wareheim, G...

Let's make this clear right up front: Ayn Rand sucked. She was a delusional, petty person who admired mass murderers, espoused a political worldview that was contemptuous, racist, and a little too giddy about borderline-genocidal fantasies. People who like Ayn Rand frequently but not always manage to be, not only pieces of shit, but te...

Digital culture is predisposed towards irony, because digital culture annihilates context. It's impossible to create a set of shared norms—and anybody who tries will find themselves constrained by the medium itself. How can you propagate a set of norms when the Internet reduces your voice to one among many, no matter how loudly you or ...

I was under the impression that, as part of this service, I would receive no information about my subscribers, or even about whether I had any. It turns out I do see which email addresses are subscribed to this—nothing more than that, and nothing creepy like IP address or location, but I figured I'd mention that in case it matters to a...

I figure I should write a little thing about this service I'm using, because good things are rare and this is a rare good thing. HEY is an email service, the second product of a company that's existed for 20+ years now. They have a reputation for being a bit stubborn, and for making things that are almost unsettlingly simple. HEY is no...

I wrote a book when I was 17. (Don't hunt it down—it's not worth it.) Before then, I'd written a number of shorter pieces, each of which felt like a piece that knew what it was doing; once I started to write the book, though, I pretty much just wrote the book. Books, apparently, are very big! Towards the end, when the book was nearly f...

I had the start of a really long and soul-reaching thing going here, but an album's out by a guy I really like, so I'mma listen to it instead of saying things here. We'll start this thing up tomorrow or whenever!